1. Technical Field
Example embodiments of the present invention relate in general to a method and apparatus for detecting an object in an image, and more specifically to a method and apparatus for detecting an object using a volumetric feature vector and 3D Haar-like filters.
2. Related Art
An interface using vision-based hand gestures has come into the spotlight as a natural and human-friendly interface in a virtual space. Since hand gesture recognition can provide a variety of information through hand gestures having fast communication features and implicative meanings, active research is recently being conducted on the hand gesture recognition.
However, it is still difficult to search for a hand and recognize a hand gesture in a complex background. Particularly, the hand should be exactly detected more than anything else so as to recognize the hand gesture. The more exactly a hand area is detected, the more exactly a hand gesture is recognized. Therefore, research has been conducted to develop methods of readily detecting a hand area even in a complex background.
However, such hand detection techniques do not show high detection performance due to the deficiency of unique features of a hand. This becomes a primary factor that causes the hand detection techniques not to be practically applied to various systems in spite of excellent applicability of the hand detection techniques.
The existing hand detection techniques are performed using skin color or 2D appearance information, but do not show robust detection performance due to a change in environment, a change in illumination or a change in pose of a hand. A variety of objects similar to the skin color of a hand exist in actual environment, and a sudden change in illumination causes a change in value of an actual skin color. The hand is a non-rigid body having five fingers, and hence generates various changes in its pose.